Editorial
In talking with Alisa Klein about Grow Food Northampton for the story that begins on page 25, she shared some sobering statistics in explaining why the nonprofit’s work is so important.
One is 30% — that’s the percentage of families in Hampden and Hampshire counties that are not able to access enough healthy, nutritious food on a regular basis. Many of those are single-mother households, and for families of color, the rate is much higher.
Alarmingly, that 30% figure actually shot up to close to 50% during the pandemic a few years ago. In response to that crisis, GFN launched a community food-distribution project along with the Northampton Survival Center, which delivered food weekly to 16 low-income housing sites.
“Each of our organizations has continued to do our work separately since the pandemic ended,” Klein told BusinessWest, “but it was the pandemic that kind of set off community insecurity in a new way.”
Adapting to changing needs is critical to the work that she and Michael Skillicorn, the organization’s co-executive directors, along with their teams of dedicated staffers and volunteers, do. In fact, Grow Food Northampton has been evolving since its origin in 2009, when a group of individuals banded together to save a couple of Florence farms — land that has since become a community farm that benefits local farmers, a community garden used by more than 400 local residents, a giving garden that grows thousands of pounds of food annually for food pantries and community meal sites, and much more, including a robust educational program.
The pandemic may have drawn sharp lines around the importance of a local food economy, Klein said, but it doesn’t take a crisis to understand why it’s always important to support farming, help low-income people access food, and, as a byproduct, reduce the pollution created by transporting fresh food long distances.
In Western Mass., any support of local agriculture is welcome, whether it’s the grants, foundations, and donations that fuel GFN’s efforts to help small-scale growers or the many funding partners of the Harold Grinspoon Charitable Foundation’s Local Farmer Awards, which have assisted with capital projects on farms for the past 11 years (the latest winners will be announced in April).
Because, as Klein said, “if you lose farmland, you can’t grow your own food, and you become dependent on the national food system.” And if national crisis strikes — and even if it doesn’t — it’s good to have a safety net close to home.
